


Everything A Growing Gem Needs

by Kaoupa



Series: A Pink Planet [5]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-23 01:35:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19140949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaoupa/pseuds/Kaoupa
Summary: Earth needs work to be a planet capable of supporting both gem and human life. But there are things on Earth that are all too pleasant, for those gems who take their time to look around.





	Everything A Growing Gem Needs

For a second, she was aware - of absolutely nothing. 

She couldn’t see - what was sight? Hearing - what did she have to hear with? Taste? Touch? Smell? None of these meant anything.

All that meant anything, in that instant, was the words running through her head. There were so many of them… what did they mean?

Then, one of them came to the forefront.

_ Forward. _

Without thinking, she obeyed.

And less than a second later, everything hit her.

  
  
  


“Oooh! Pearl, another Jasper emerged!”

“I know. My Diamond.” Pearl nodded to her Diamond absently, typing in the new arrival on the screen she was holding, smiling a little at her Diamond’s joy. They had, at her insistence, had always taken time off to see her new gems emerging into the world - no matter what else she might have to do.

And with all of the human tribes, clans, groups, or whatever form of governance they had at the moment having to get a “shipment” of gem-made water and fruits every few weeks, and all the Amethysts and Rose Quartzes who were delivering them, plus all the arguments over what should be done with the humans… well, there was a lot of things that she should have been doing.

“She’s so big!” Pink Diamond looked as though she was going to squeal with joy as she looked over the massive Jasper, who walked “past” her Diamond.

“I… indeed, My Diamond.” Pearl forced her eyes and her mind away from that extremely unproductive (but strangely appealing) form and line of thought and typed in the new Quartz’s massive specifications and frame. “Likely the most physically impressive Quartz produced on Earth so far.”

“And Yellow said that putting the Kindergarten out here would just create a bunch of “worthless Off Color Chalcedonies”.” Pink Diamond continued, doing a mocking imitation of her fellow Diamond’s voice. “Hmmmph.”

“Technically speaking, the Beta Kindergarten-” Pearl began to speak, only to cut herself off when she saw a section of the canyon starting to crumble. “There! Another one’s emerging!”

“Where!?” Pink Diamond spun around, before following Pearl’s line of vision. “OOooh! Maybe it’s a Carnelian! Or another Jasper!”

“It could be a Mossy Agate, my-” Pearl’s sentence was cut off by the gem in question emerging.

She was… very small.

“It WAS a Carnelian! Pearl, how many have I gotten right so far?” Pink Diamond grinned.

Pearl smiled just a little as her eyes scanned over the report. “Roughly 51.75 percent of the currently emerged gems, my Diamond. Or to be more accurate… out of the approximately 14843 gems that we have added to the Pink Court from this Kindergarten so far, you have guessed correctly with 7681 of them!” Pearl looked pleased. “But you could have known exactly which gem is expected to emerge where if you had just taken my overlay of where each gem type was injected and the analyses of how the changing geological forces from the kindergarten and the terraforming of our Desert Glasses and Lapis Lazulis would have changed their location-”

“Pearl, where’s the fun in that?” Pink Diamond looked confused.

Pearl just sighed, before taking note of how small the Carnelian was and nodding. “Another off-color, my Dia-”

“She’s not off-color, Pearl.” Pink Diamond’s voice was uncharacteristically hard. “She’s perfect.”

Pearl just blinked, before nodding. “Well, considering the lack of life energy drained from the area and the number of gems with deviations from the norm in this Kindergarten, I suppose that Carnelian could be considered acceptable as a Quartz in comparison to some of the others.”

Pink Diamond just sighed. “Okay, Pearl. How long till all the gems that we’ve implanted here are due to emerge?”

Pearl took a look over the files, before nodding. “Due to the large amounts of silica preventing us from going further into the Earth, and the current lack of any machinery or gems with the ability to move it out of the way, the Kindergarten has been greatly underseeded - roughly a thousandth of what would be possibly with a full capacity colony. We are at roughly the 49.5% mark for the number of gems we are expecting to emerge.”

“So, it should take about… another day for them to all emerge?” Pink Diamond had been crouching down on the floor for long enough that most humans would have fallen over due to a lack of bloodflow to their legs.

Pearl decided to avoid the technical explanation that her Diamond probably wouldn’t have cared for, and went with simple. “Yes. Though this only assumes that we won’t have any major outliers with emergence time such as Amethyst Facet 5 Cut 8XM again…”

  
  
  


As the Chalcedony Quartzes started to gather from around the Kindergarten, they started to wonder what was going on. Why were they all here? It was nice, meeting everyone, but wasn’t there supposed to be someone they were supposed to meet?

“Hello there!” Came an oddly familiar voice. But as the Quartzes turned around as one, towards the Warp Pad none of them had gone to yet, none of them recognized the gem who was standing there. Wasn’t she supposed to be… pinker than that? “I’m Rose Quartz, Facet 2F2B Cut 9RE! Pink Diamond sent me down to greet you!”

_ Pink Diamond _ . The name rang within all of their minds the second that she said it - they recognized that name. The name they’d been created to serve. The name that viewed them all as significant enough to send a fellow gem away from their purpose just to greet them as they emerged.

None of them, in their “infancy” of the programming put into them, really thought anything about that last bit was anything but amazing. Grinning eagerly, several of them waved at the Rose Quartz. She seemed to take it as an invitation to come over and start talking.

Later on, the respect of the Beta Quartzes would only grow if they were among those who found out who the Quartz in question really was.

  
  
  


“Pearl, what should I do with them?”

Blinking at the fact that her Diamond had addressed a question to her, Pearl turned around to her Diamond, who was surveying what appeared to be a number of screens, one of which was displaying the recently emerged Beta Quartzes. They weren’t really doing that much at the moment - indeed, they were mostly standing around in the Beta Kindergarten. Pearl could see a few of them roughhousing

“If this was a typical colony, well... “ Pearl grimaced a little bit. “I suspect that your fellow Diamonds would be ordering them to a barracks offworld for an Agate to train them - Agates we do not have. Or sending them out to deal with any life forms that could cause issues for the colonization.” Pearl knew her Diamond well enough to know that, without an incredibly serious affront from the life forms in question, that latter option would not be happening. Sure enough, Pink Diamond had a look of disgust on her face. “But if I might make a suggestion, there seem to be several different conflicts between certain groups of humans on the surface. Perhaps you-”

Pearl’s requested thoughts to Pink Diamond were cut off by the screen in front of Pink Diamond suddenly vanishing as a yellow screen with a very certain symbol appeared.

“Oh, Yellow! Good to see you!” Pink Diamond hastily plastered a smile on her face, which was only about two-thirds sincere.

“Pink. I’ve studied the reports on your new Beta Kindergarten.” the other Diamond replied, not bothering to give any form of friendly greeting. “The number of defective quartzes produced -”

“Yellow, I told you before, it was an experiment in growing gems while drawing on lowered amounts of planetary life.” Pink Diamond let the smile fall away into a slight glower at the insult to her Quartzes. “I deemed the risk of any one gem being imperfect to be acceptable as a risk if it would allow for the Kindergarteners to try new injection methods.”

Yellow Diamond’s eyes narrowed. “Of the 30,872 quartzes that emerged from the Kindergarten, the report has stated that there are 3146 of them who are off-color. Hardly one gem, Pink. If I had over a  _ five _ percent rate of defective gems from a single Kindergarten, I would have shattered the implanters for such incompetence.”

“On your worlds, yes. But I need all the gems I can get at this time. Earth is an experiment in-” Pink Diamond began to reply to her fellow Diamond, about the many theoretical ways that she’d heard from the first few Peridots and Fluorites about their ideas on altering Kindergarten production methods, which they’d never been allowed to give to someone before. She was cut off mid-sentence.

“An  _ experiment _ , Pink, that was allowed because you were able to get White to agree that a method of delayed long-term gem production was possible with a new world. And that I and Blue would not be able to change our methods entirely without an unacceptable drop in our expansion rates for a _ untested theory _ .” Yellow cut in. “And your current results have not been impressive - I suggest that you reconsider the way you are creating your colony, and  _ deal _ with the off colors. Or White may reconsider her decision.”

Without waiting for a reply, the call ended on Yellow Diamond’s end. Pink Diamond just sighed, but Pearl looked furious, before she started protesting. “This - Pink Diamond! How can she do that?! It was agreed that the other Diamonds would allow you to experiment as you wished here on Earth! They’re breaking their word!”

Pink Diamond was, in a way, touched by her assistant’s anger on her behalf. “I know, Pearl.” She sighed. “But… well, we haven’t really done anything impressive for them yet. And trust me, if we can’t do that they’ll take my control of Earth away and make me do things their way.”

Pearl looked shocked. She’d heard her Diamond comment many times, quietly, about how the other Diamonds never took her seriously, but she never stopped being surprised when she saw it happening. 

The supposed to be equal Authority had only half its members equal in any way.

And the one who was the best of them, to her, was the lowest and least influential of all.

  
  
  


Pearl knew for a fact that many of the duties that Pink - her Diamond sent her to do were not things that she was supposed to be doing - but then, Yellow had always bragged when they met about how her Diamond trusted her enough to make her a secretary, against the traditional standards of Homeworld. Since she was a Diamond, well, who would complain?

But… Pearl would admit, she wasn’t entirely fond of having to go interview humans and other gems on their thoughts and opinions on how things were going. It was... she'd just rather spend time with Pink Diamond.

She’d felt what probably was what humans described as “sick” the first time that she’d watch several of them, as well as a Amethyst and a Rose Chalcedony who had been talked into it, devouring some of the fruits that had been delivered.

And then there was  _ this _ .

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” A pair of Jaspers who had been heading back towards the main Beta Kindergarten stopped midstep, turning around to look at their Diamond’s Pearl.

“We’re going back to our posts at the Kindergarten after talking to the humans?” One of them replied, her tone making it clear that she didn’t understand the rage in Pearl’s tone as her hands absently played with  _ that thing _ .

“That is NOT what I meant!” Pearl hissed as she ripped the offending object away from the Jasper, ignoring the “HEY!” that resulted from this. “You shattered a fellow gem, it appears to me! And you took one of their shards for an ORNAMENT!!”

“I didn’t make this thing!” The Jasper shouted back, trying to grab for the golden necklace that had been given to her. “A - a human leader gave it to me! They said it was an amber necklace, and to bring it to our Diamond as thanks for all we’ve done for them!”

Pearl blinked, then looked down at the necklace. Looking closer, the gem within the mostly-gold necklace was… different. In a few key ways than most gem shards would be. It wasn’t struggling and trying to form a arm, leg, foot, or some other body part at seeming random, first.

And second…

  
  
  


“What’s amber?” Pink Diamond, for the first time in a while, looked puzzled. She’d never heard of such a thing before...

“It appears to be a gemstone that the humans use, my Diamond.” Pearl replied in a tone that was nearly as confused. She’d been looking over the necklace and through the gem databases as she headed back towards the Moon Base. 

But the problem was…

“It also doesn’t seem to be present in our records, either.” Pink Diamond looked surprised by this, then delighted.

“Pearl, we discovered a new gemstone! Do you know what this could mean?! We could delay the colonization until we decide what they could be used for!” Then a thought passed through her head.

But Pearl had already anticipated that. “If I may speak?” Pink Diamond nodded in reply. Pearl hadn’t just accepted that humanity had somehow discovered a gemstone that gems had never discovered in the last hundred millennia of their reign and the hundreds, if not thousands, of planets they’d explored. It was likely that the humans had just named a topaz or some other gemstone incorrectly, or come up with a new name for something they already knew. She’d even taken a sample and had it scanned by a Danburite on her way back! As it turned out, that’d been what gave her the answer.

“The gemstone’s composition is indeed unique to Earth in our database-” She began to speak, before being cut off mid sentence by a squeal of delight.

“Pearl! Thank you! I’m going to go talk to-” Pink Diamond began to get up. She didn’t finish before Pearl let out a squawk.

“My Diamond! The reason for this is that the amber gemstone is derived from organic life forms!” Pink Diamond halted instantly, turning back to Pearl with a look of total curiosity on her face.

Recognizing the unspoken words that her Diamond would likely say next, Pearl continued without hesitating. “Amber, as a substance, appears to have been formed several million years ago, likely from several geological ages in the past. It appears to have been derived from organic plant life, likely the large plants called trees.”

Pink Diamond’s utter enrapture was clear to anyone who looked, Pearl most of all. She smiled a little - knowing that her Diamond was happy about her discovery made her happy as well. Both from the knowledge that she’d helped, and the approval for a job well done.

“Pearl, do you know what this means?!” Pink Diamond looked absolutely delighted. “It just came from the trees!”

“Well, yes, my-” Pearl’s agreement was cut off again.

“But Pearl, there’s so much more on Earth than just trees! Do you think - could every living thing down there make a gemstone, do you think?!”

Upon hearing that, Pearl felt her inner skeptic, the part of her that had been meant to keep her Diamond’s urges partly in line, stepped up. 

“My Diamond, I doubt that every society on Earth or organism is capable of producing an entire gemstone type - it seems more likely that we may simply find several potential new ones here.” Pearl replied carefully. 

“Even so, Pearl, finding out all about that could take _ years _ !” Pink Diamond seemed perhaps a little too thrilled at the prospect of slowing down her own colony. 

That could have been either due to her interest in organic life, or just wanting to do less work.

  
  
  


Pearl had to admit, as she looked over the large collection of stones that had been collected in front of her, she was sort of impressed.

It had taken many years (by human standards) for this to be finished. The Amethysts, Rose Quartzes, Jaspers, Carnelians, Rose Chalcedonies, Pink Chalcedonies, and the other gems of the Pink Court who had free time on their hands or worked as diplomats were ordered to go out to all of the human civilizations that they knew about on a gemstone hunt.

It had gotten some rather good results, to say the least. There were more than fifty gemstones that were laid out on the tables, deemed as worthy of study by a Diamond to determine their potential use.

“What’s this, Pearl?” Pink Diamond asked curiously, picking up a new gem. “It’s so pretty!”

Taking a look at the rainbow colored gemstone, Pearl mentally reviewed the information she’d been studying repeatedly for the last few decades, as more and more reports were sent in. Checking and cross-comparing all of the different gems had been a very long and somewhat complicated process.

“That’s an Opal, my Diamond.”

“An Opal?” Pink Diamond sounded curious as she looked it over, already fascinated. “I’ve never heard of that before!”

“It’s slightly odd that we wouldn’t have, my Diamond.” Pearl replied. “Opal appears to be a hydrated form of Quartz silica. Their chemical compounds are identical except for the water inside them.”

“So we’ve discovered a new type of Quartz?” 

“Not exactly! The water inside of the gemstone would make it impractical as a military gem due to an unacceptably low hardness. But we’re running a few preliminary analyses on a theoretical Gem that could emerge.” Pearl replied.

“Oh! Maybe we could have them be like my Rose Quartzes, and have them focus on defensive things!” 

“Well, if nothing else, they would likely be unacceptable as front line fighters to the other Diamonds…” Pearl began to mentally ponder the potential uses of another team-defense oriented Quartz.

The Chalcedony Quartzes such as Jaspers and Carnelians were all… lacking in their powers, but they were typically far stronger and more durable than other Quartzes in exchange. And while close combat was essential at times, the Quartzes usually just fought in the arenas for sport rather than in actual wars. And fights between chalcedonies could often be… less interesting.

Quartzes like Citrines or Amethysts typically had some form of additional powers, but… they weren’t quite as durable or strong, in exchange.

The Rose Quartzes had, in Pearl’s mind, been a stroke of genius on her Diamond’s part - a military gem that could focus on protecting the rest of the unit and keeping them running, allowing them to fight without as much worry about whether or not they’d be able to continue. They couldn’t really participate much in the arenas - but they could do a great deal of good outside them with their unique healing powers.

Then, she realized that Pink Diamond had moved on to another sample, and was calling for her. Hastily, she moved along.

  
  
  


“What exactly are these Corals of yours even supposed to do, Pink?” Blue Diamond looked skeptical in the extreme as the junior Diamond made her report.

“Oh, all sorts of things! They’re mostly supposed to do things related to what the humans have to do. Like… they’re supposed to help deal with all the plants and animals here on Earth! Oh, and they’ll probably  work a lot with humans too.”

Blue Diamond just sighed. “Pink, do you really think that the humans are going to be of any use regardless of how much you can improve them?”

“They were the ones who told us about the different Corals, Ambers, Opals, and the other gems on Earth that we never used or really knew about before, weren’t they?” Pink Diamond shot back.

Frowning, Blue Diamond didn’t respond. But she didn’t argue.

“Anyways, how is that organic park we put up on Homeworld doing? Is it popular?” Pink pressed a different topic.

Blue Diamond sighed. “It’s doing well. But there have been a few complaints about Rubies who nearly caused a fire there.” 

“Well, that’s why I told you that it would probably be a good idea to have some Lapis Lazulis there.” 

  
  
  


It was sort of ironic. Usually, when new gems were emerging, Pink Diamond was the most excited one.

“My Diamond,  **look at them** !” Pearl squealed in delight as she pressed her face against the glass window. “They’re so  **_beautiful_ ** !” The organic gems were so much like her, in appearance - their noses weren’t pointed, but their gems were smooth and rough, like a Pearl’s was, and had they had come out in several different appearances and shades despite receiving the same ratio of injected essences.

“I know, Pearl!” This didn’t mean that the gem in question wasn’t excited, just not as much. “You did an amazing job with your argument for them, too!”

“You were the one who gave it, though.” Pearl didn’t take her face off the window as she replied, still studying the underwater landscape in front of her. As well as the new gem type that had started emerging from it, that she’d helped bring into existence.

“You did an amazing job helping though, Pearl.” Pink Diamond replied, smiling as the Corals started talking among themselves. “You helped me work everything out that the Labradorites sent. You helped me develop the theories on how to make possible. I couldn’t have done it without you there.”

Once, Pearl would have thought that receiving such praise from a Diamond was, in its own way, unacceptable. She was there to serve her and make her happy, and obey her place in the caste system. She wasn’t supposed to bend the rules to act as a scientist or her assistant, like Yellow Diamond’s Pearl did for her mistress.

Now, she just flushed blue as she accepted the praise.

And as the two watched the Corals notice and start paddling through the water towards the aquatic ship they’d brought, Pink Diamond’s hand came down and started affectionately rustling Pearl’s hair.

And Pearl’s hand quietly rose up to meet it.


End file.
